The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  They carried their cups outside and took a bench each.

  Mair stretched out her legs and rested her head against warm, splintery wood. The snow and ice walls glittered in the crystal air. With so much space around her she had the luxurious sense that there was infinite time to ask all the questions that simmered in her head.

  In his new, hesitant way Bruno told her about his life in the cabin.

  ‘When I first came up here there was still snow on the ground. I’d wake up to find chamois and hare prints passing the door. I’d put on my skis and follow them as far as I could. If I’m in a hurry, I walk as far as the station and get the train on down to the village you came through to buy food and pick up emails, but there is no hurry. I keep a bike at the station so I usually cycle or even walk all the way there and back again. It only takes a couple of hours. At the … beginning, after she died, I’d walk and walk, from dawn until dark. As fast and as far as I could, until I was ready to drop. As if I could ever walk away from what happened. I realised, in the end, that that was what I was trying to do. It’s better now I know that much.’

  Mair nodded, full of sorrow and sympathy.

  Her impulse was to jump up and hold him in her arms, but she resisted it. Bruno was tough, even though he spoke with such raw frankness. He didn’t need her mothering.

  They drank their tea and watched birds gliding over the ridge.

  After a while he said, ‘I collected this from my sister, when I knew you were coming. She lives in Bern.’ He brought out a big album with heavy black boards split and frayed at the corners. He turned pages until he found what he was looking for.

  ‘This is Rainer Stamm, with my grandfather, in 1937.’

  It was a deckle-edged black-and-white photograph of two men wearing breeches with braces and flannel shirts. They were standing in front of what appeared to be a station halt somewhere in the mountains. Both of them were smoking, smiling, squinting a little against strong sunlight.

  Mair looked for a long time.

  The pin-up. Caroline’s words.

  ‘He was rather handsome, wasn’t he?’ she said.

  ‘Prita was only married to him for a matter of weeks before he died, but she never took up with another man in Switzerland, or India, as far as I know. She told me once that the European ladies in Srinagar adored him.’

  Remembering the picture of Nerys, in a moment of high happiness, Mair thought, maybe.

  Quite possibly Grandma had been one of those ladies. It was wartime. There would have been the opportunity, after all – she knew from Hope and the Glory of God that missionaries were often away in the field. She found herself hoping that Nerys had indeed stolen some romantic moments with the pin-up. It would have given her some wicked, glamorous memories to help her through the Welsh years of chapel, village politics, and being the preacher’s wife that must have followed. Mair had never envied her grandmother’s way of life, or her mother’s.

  ‘Would you like some more tea?’ Bruno’s voice made her jump.

  ‘Yes, please.’ She smiled.

  Later, while Bruno was frying potatoes and schnitzel, she leafed through the other Becker family pictures. In two or three Prita was a small upright figure, at the end of the line or standing a little apart. What must it have been like for her, she wondered, an Indian widow so far from home? But Mrs Stamm had an indomitable look. She was a survivor.

  They ate facing each other at the wooden table, yellow-lit by an oil lamp.

  ‘You’re a good cook,’ she said appreciatively.

  ‘Karen didn’t like cooking. It’s strange to be making food for someone other than myself up here.’ Mair listened to the silence that seeped around them. ‘Strange but good,’ he added. ‘Thank you for coming all this way.’

  Afterwards they took glasses of schnapps out to their benches. The sky faded from royal blue to infinite darkness, with the mountains radiating spectral light.

  ‘We drank all that cognac at Lamayuru,’ she said deliberately. She didn’t want to remind him but neither did she want there to be topics they had to steer away from. But he seemed relieved to remember the place. He had spent a lot of time alone recently and she guessed that the words came more easily out of doors, looking ahead into the darkness, than face to face in the lamplight.

  He said, ‘I remember everything we talked about. And the food they gave us, and the faces of the drivers sitting opposite, and the snow when we went out to the yard.’

  Cold snapped suddenly out of the silence and drove them back inside the cabin.

  ‘I go to bed very early,’ he said awkwardly. She knew that he needed solitude.

  Lying on her mattress, listening to the cabin creaking around her ears, Mair thought that this could be one of the most romantic places in the world, including the lake at Srinagar. The creaking wood even echoed the protests of Solomon and Sheba as it sank lower in the water. This sapphire lake was a miniature of the other, reflecting its own shimmering peaks. Even the wild flowers splashed the same colours as her grandmother’s shawl.

  She had a strange sense of time tucking inside itself, folding, dovetailing with minute precision.

  On the other side of the plank wall Bruno was absolutely silent. He didn’t clear his throat or turn over. She thought he must be lying on his back too, staring up towards the old beams.

  Soon she slept.

  There was a delicious smell of coffee and frying bacon.

  She yawned her way down the ladder.

  ‘Eggs with your bacon?’ Bruno asked, holding up a wooden spatula. He brushed aside her protests, saying that they were going walking and she would need to fuel up.

  ‘If you want to go higher into the hills, of course?’ he added. It struck her that he was uncertain of her response, but that he wanted to please her. The realisation made her skin prickle as if it had become electrostatic.

  They set off from the hut, uphill along a high mountain path, then negotiating a moraine ridge. Bruno pointed to the chains of peaks and named each one for her. He also began to tell her what else he knew about Rainer Stamm.

  The mystery of his disappearance or death had never been solved although the official explanation, that he had skidded off a Kashmir mountain road when Prita and the child were already aboard ship on their way to Europe, had enabled his wife – eventually – to inherit his estate. He had left everything he had to her, including a house in Interlaken.

  ‘There is another story, though,’ Bruno said.

  ‘Go on.’ Mair was panting for breath and it was much easier to listen than try to talk.

  ‘In 1945 there was an attempt by a Swiss-American climbing team to conquer Nanga Parbat.’

  ‘Nanga Parbat again?’

  Tinley and his ancient uncle, smoking bidis in the graveyard at Leh and waiting while she read the inscriptions. She had discovered the memorial to Cambridge mathematician Matthew Forbes, lost in an avalanche on the mountain.

  ‘Exactly. Again.’

  Mair glanced back over her shoulder, towards the wall of the Eiger.

  ‘There were three Western names on the climbing permit for that ’forty-five expedition. Two Americans and a Swiss by the name of Martin Brunner.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, Brunner was killed. He had gone up with one of the sherpas to recce a higher camp and there was a storm. The sherpa eventually made it back to rejoin the Americans, but Brunner had been injured in a fall and couldn’t down-climb. I tracked down the expedition report in the annals of the American Mountaineering Association, so I know the details.’

  Bruno walked at the same sure pace, uphill or down, whatever the ground. Mair had to watch where she placed her feet and it was a moment before she was able to ask, ‘Why were you so interested in this Martin Brunner?’

  He glanced at her, enjoying keeping her in suspense. The hesitancy in his voice had disappeared as they talked more. He was a good storyteller.

  ‘Because he didn’t exist. There are no Swiss records of a climbe
r by that name. His details on the permit are false, too. They don’t relate to anyone.’

  ‘I see. Do I?’

  Bruno raised an eyebrow. ‘Come on. You can guess.’

  ‘Brunner was really Rainer Stamm?’

  ‘I can’t prove it, but I believe so. My grandfather was guide to the Forbes family as well as Rainer, and he said that Rainer always promised Matthew’s father that he’d go back and claim Nanga Parbat in the boy’s honour. In the end it wasn’t climbed until 1953, by Hermann Buhl, just a few weeks after you British knocked off Everest.’

  ‘But why under a false identity?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know. Shall we stop here and have something to eat?’

  Mair had begun to think they would walk all day but, to her relief, he led the way to a flat-topped rock. She sank down, resting her chin on her knees to marvel at the view. Bruno handed her a chunk of bread, some mountain cheese and an apple. The simple food tasted wonderful.

  ‘Rainer would have had his reasons for the assumed identity and for faking his own death. He was a magician as well as a mountaineer. An illusionist.’

  ‘Ah, I know about that.’ Mair laughed. ‘Because I looked him up too. It was confusing.’

  Bruno was staring across to the black rock face where Rainer’s life had been saved by Victor Becker.

  Mair thought, That same man was perhaps my grandmother’s lover, certainly her good friend. Her sense of time’s intricate dovetailing grew even stronger. She murmured, ‘It’s sad, isn’t it? Rainer was newly married, he was performing some kind of disappearing trick with his own life, and then he actually disappeared trying to claim Nanga Parbat in memory of a boy who had already died on the mountain. I do know that for years afterwards my grandmother was waiting and hoping for news of him.’

  Bruno said, ‘Yes, that’s sad. But perhaps she also understood what made him who he was. Many lives were lost on Nanga Parbat before Buhl climbed it. Sixteen men on a single day in 1937. Rainer would have known all that, but still he went. Perhaps he needed to live and to risk death in that way, because extreme risk was in the end the only reality he could subscribe to. Maybe the gravity of mountains and the weightlessness of magical illusion were always opposing within him. He probably hid the compulsion even from the people he loved. He must have been a fascinating character. Do you think your grandmother loved him?’

  ‘Yes, I do. And, yes, I think you’re probably right.’

  The shawl, the photograph, the lock of hair.

  The quirks of history that linked her to Bruno Becker, the vertiginous face of the mountain confronting them – all these things made a pattern that seemed, in that moment, part of a bigger and only partly intelligible design.

  This realisation made Mair feel happy in a profound way that seemed entirely new to her.

  ‘Now it’s time to talk about Zahra,’ she said.

  Bruno stood up and shook breadcrumbs off his lap. Two Alpine choughs greedily descended on them.

  ‘Later,’ he said, the adept storyteller again. ‘Can you remember the mountain names? What’s that one?’ He pointed at a vast tumble of rock and snow.

  ‘Um, is it the Wetterhorn?’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  They ate dinner back at the cabin, and afterwards Bruno lit the oil lamps. They were sitting inside with the door closed because clouds had drifted across the sky and a chill wind rolled down off the glacier. He took another book off the shelf and opened it. With her head bent close to his, Mair saw that it was a more modern photograph album with sticky plastic interleaving the pages. Some of the pictures were even in fading colour.

  ‘This is Zahra.’

  A solemn little girl with dark brown hair worn in two looped plaits, lined up with a row of other children in school dresses. Her skin was darker than her companions’, but not distinctly so.

  ‘And here.’ Bruno pointed.

  She was a teenager in this one, short-haired, dressed in jeans and a blue-checked shirt. Her face was more clearly visible and Mair studied it for any resemblance to Caroline Bowen. She could see none at all. Zahra had aquiline features and dark eyebrows that almost met at the bridge of her nose.

  ‘There’s only one more. Mine wasn’t a family for photographing every rite of passage.’

  Zahra stood near the top of a flight of stone steps with Prita on the one above her. Their heads were level. Prita’s hair was greying now, centre-parted and drawn loosely back. Zahra was perhaps twenty, solemn and formal in a dark skirt and jacket. Even in their Western clothes, Mair thought, they looked distinctly Kashmiri. Their features were quite different but they could have been taken for biological mother and daughter because of something poised about the way they looked into the camera, heads up and gaze unwavering. She reflected that the two of them must have been closer than many natural mothers and daughters because of their difference from their Swiss friends and neighbours.

  Bruno answered an unspoken question. ‘That must have been taken when Zahra was at university. Prita and she always had an understanding that once Zahra had finished her education they would go back to Kashmir.’

  He collected his two glasses from the shelf and poured schnapps, slid one across the table to Mair. ‘My father told me that they often joked about it together. Before the maharajah finally acceded to India, he used to claim that he wanted Kashmir to be a sort of Asian Switzerland. Independent, neutral, on friendly terms with all its neighbours. Prita and Zahra would say that Maharajah Hari Singh originally had the right idea, at least. They knew that much from the real Switzerland.’

  ‘So they went back?’

  ‘Yes, not long after that picture. It was in the mid-seventies, before the really bad times of the insurgency, but you more or less know what they found.’

  Mair did.

  ‘Srinagar became a dangerous place. They settled eventually in Delhi. Zahra taught European languages at one of the universities.’

  ‘Did she marry?’

  Bruno gave one of his rare smiles, and drained his schnapps. ‘Yes. She had three boys. I believe one is a pilot, one is a software designer, one is an architect.’

  Mair beamed with satisfaction. ‘How wonderful.’

  ‘It is, rather. I’d like very much to have been able to visit her in Delhi.’

  The yellow light of the lamp hollowed darker shadows out of Bruno’s face. In the silence that followed they listened to the rising wind and the old cabin creaking like a ship at sea. Bruno’s eyes were on the photograph of Lotus with her white hair blown into a cloud around her head. ‘In a few more weeks, it will be a whole year since she died.’

  As gently as she could, she asked, ‘Will you be here on your own?’

  ‘I don’t think I shall be fit company for anyone else.’

  ‘Bruno …’

  ‘I know. She’s dead and she won’t come back, and those of us who are left behind have to pick up and carry on without her. I’m doing it, Mair. But it takes time and an effort of will.’ His head dropped suddenly into his hands and he clawed his fingers through his hair. With his face hidden he said, in a muffled voice made jagged by pain, ‘It takes so much effort. To wake, to exist for another day, to sleep – or try to. Over and over again, living while all the time Lotus is dead.’

  She got up from her seat and went to him. This time she couldn’t stop herself. She put her hands on his bowed shoulders. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you to do anything any differently. I wouldn’t have the cheek, when you’re already braver than it seems possible to be. I was going to say that if you wanted someone to stay with you, even nearby, I’ll be here. I was at Lamayuru. I saw how it happened. There would be nothing to explain.’

  She had meant it in the sense that there would be no need to describe the sequence of those events to someone who had not witnessed them, but he flinched under her hands.

  ‘She was so innocent and trusting and yet we couldn’t keep her safe. I can never explain that away.’


  ‘There’s no explanation to be made. Not about what happened, or how. It was a terrible accident.’

  He was choking now with sobs. Mair’s face was wet too. She cradled his head against her ribs and waited as he wept.

  In the end he raised his head and she immediately released her hold. Her hands retained the memory of his skull shape and the thickness of his hair. She went back to her seat and, after a last look at Prita and Zahra, she closed the photograph album.

  ‘I could hear your heart beating,’ Bruno said. There was an odd, disbelieving glimmer in his face that she read as hope. In a voice so low that she could barely hear the words, he added, ‘Another human heart.’

  He reached for the bottle and refilled their glasses. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said. ‘Can we do that? I’m surprised to realise it but I’ve enjoyed today. I’d forgotten what it’s like to talk and have someone listen, taking in what you say and measuring it up and shaping an answer in a voice different from your own, instead of the monologue going on and on in your own head. I’ve been alone too long. I don’t want to talk about Lo any more, though. I will do eventually, if you’ll listen, but I’m not ready yet. Is that all right, Mair?’

  His words were falling over each other now, all the hesitancy obliterated.

  ‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘That’s quite all right. You could tell me some more about Prita and Zahra, maybe. Were they very close?’

  He listened to the wind for a few seconds. Then he settled back in his seat, ready for the story. Mair found that she breathed more easily.

  ‘Yes, they were. There were a few disagreements, I think. Zahra was my father’s generation but she was quite modern in her outlook, and Prita was very traditional. But by the time I was old enough to notice anything, they were devoted to each other. They came back here two or three times while I was growing up to visit my father and their other friends. Prita used to give me Indian sweets in amazing colours, and I thought that was very exotic. Zahra taught me some words of Urdu.’